August 2017 Entries

The development tools and processes for Azure Functions are ever changing. We started out only being able to create a function through the portal which I did a series on. We then got a template in VS2015, but it really didn’t work very well. They have since been able to create functions as Web Application libraries and now we are close the the release of a VS2017 template.

This post will walk through the basics of using the VS2017 Preview with the Visual Studio Tools For Azure Functions which you can download here.

Create New Project

To create the initial solution open up the New Project dialog and find the Azure Function project type, name your project and click OK.

Create New Function

To add a function to your project, right-click the project and select New Item. In the New Item dialog select Azure Function and provide a name for the class and click Add.

The next dialog which will appear is the New Azure Function dialog. Here you will select the function trigger type and its parameters. In the example below a timer trigger has been selected and a Cron schedule definition is automatically defined to execute every 5 minutes.

Also in this dialog you can set the name of the function. When you compile a folder will be created with that name in you bin directory which will be used later for deployment.

Add Bindings

With each generation of Azure Function development the way you initially define bindings changes (even if they stay the same behind the scenes). Initially you had to use the portal Integrate page. This had its advantages. It would visually prompt you for the type of binding and the parameters for that binding.

With the Visual Studio template you have to add attributes to the Run method of your function class. This requires that you know what the attribute names are and what parameters are available and their proper values. You can find a list of the main binding attributes here.

At compile time the attributes will be used to generate a function.json file with your trigger and bindings definition.

Add NuGet Packages

If you are building functions in the portal you have to create a projects.json file that defines the packages you want to include. This requires that you know the format of the file. Thankfully with the Visual Studio template you can use the normal Nuget Package manager.

Deploying

There are a couple of ways to deploy your solution. In the end a Function App is a specialized App Service. This means you have the same deployment options of Visual Studio, PowerShell or via VSTS continuous deployment. The main difference is that you don’t have a web.config file and have to manage you app settings and connection strings through the portal. This can be reached by following the Application Settings link under the Configured Features section of the Function App Overview page.

Summary

While creating Azure Functions still isn’t a WYSIWYG turn key process the latest incarnation gives us an ALM capable solution. I believe this is the development approach that will stabilize for the foreseeable future and anyone who is creating Functions should invest in learning.

Application Insights is one of those tools that has been around for a number of years now, but is finally getting understood as more companies move to Azure as a cloud solution. It has become an amazing tool for monitoring the performance of your application, but it can also work as a general logging platform as I have posted before.

Now that you are capturing all this information how can you leverage it? Going to the Azure portal whenever you want an answer is time consuming. It would be great if you could automate this process. Of course there are a number of metrics that you can create alerts for directly via the portal, but what if you want a non-standard metric or want to do something beside just send an alert?

Fortunately Microsoft has a REST API in beta for Application Insights. It allows you to check standard metrics as well as run custom queries as you do in the Analytics portal. Let’s explore how to use this API.

In this post will show how to create a demo that implements an Azure Function which calls the Application Insights REST API and then send the results out using SendGrid. I created them with the VS2017 Preview and the new Azure Functions templates.

Generate Custom Events

First we need some data to work with. The simplest way is to leverage the TrackEvent and TrackException method of the Application Insights API. In order to do this you first need to setup a TelemetryClient. The code below I have as part of the class level variables.

After that it is simple to call the TrackEvent method on the TelemetryClient object to log an activity in your code (be aware it may take 5 minutes for an event to show up in Application Insights).

telemetry.TrackEvent($"This is a POC event");

Create a VS2017 Function Application

I will have another post on the details in the future, but if you have Visual Studio 2017 Preview 15.3.0 installed you will be able to create an Azure Functions project.

Right click the project and select the New Item context menu option and select Azure Function as shown below.

On the New Azure Function dialog select TimerTrigger and leave the remaining options as default.

Call Application Insights REST API

Once there are events in the customEvents collection we can write a query and execute it against the Application Insights REST API. To accomplish this the example uses a simple HttpClient call. The API page for Application Insights can be found here and contains the ULRs and formats for each call type. We will be using the Query API scenario which will be setup with a couple of variables.

Process Results

After we have a result we can deserialize the JSON using JSON.NET and send it to our support team via SendGrid. You will have to add the NuGet package Microsoft.Azure.WebJobs.Extensions.SendGrid.

Modify the signature of your function’s Run method to match the code sample shown here. In this example “message” is defined as an output variable for the Azure Function which is defined as a binding by using the SendGrid attribute.

We will also need a structure to deserialize the returned JSON message into. If you look at the message itself it can appear rather daunting but it breaks down into the following class structure. Create a new class file and replace the default class with this code.

Publish your solution to an Azure Function App by downloading the Function App’s profile and using the VS2017 projects publish options. You will also need to define the application settings referred to in the code so that they are appropriate for you environment. At that point you will be able to observe the results of you efforts.

Summary

This post demonstrates how a small amount of code can give you the ability to leverage Application Insights for more than just out of the box statistics alerts. This approach is flexible enough to be use for report on types of errors and monitoring if subsystems are remaining available. Combining the features within Azure’s cloud offerings gives you capabilities that would cost much more in development time and resource if they were done on premises.

My only real problem with this approach is that I would prefer to be accessing values in the result by name rather than indexes because this makes the code less readable and more brittle to changes.

Try these examples out and see what other scenarios they apply to in your business.

Tim is a Solutions Architect for PSC Group, LLC. He has been an IT consultant since 1999 specializing in Microsoft technologies. Along with running the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group and speaking on Microsoft and architecture topics he was also contributing author on "The Definitive Guide to the Microsoft Enterprise Library".